Comment by grokx
A few years ago, I started again to attend regularly to concerts, and often in small / mid size local rooms, with an audience from perhaps 50 to a few hundred people.
Those are much more meaningful to me than those giant stadiums where you watch the band on giant screens. These thoughts will seem obvious, but smaller spaces with a limited audience are really warmer. You feel much closer to the artists, you are sharing emotions, sometimes the artist comes playing or singing in the middle of the audience. Things happen! A guitar string breaks, a drum falls, the singer goes out of tune. This is real live music!
We do agree with this, we both prefer attending small gigs ourselves for that exact reason. Also, all bands has to start somewhere, it takes many small gigs to create an audience and develop their craft. Writing and producing songs is one thing but there is no substitution to the experience to see what moves in people listening live. The majority big stadium bands started with endless small non paying gigs, this is the foundation of the music business.